If Robert Heinlein were to write The Moon today (see Part 1), there’s no doubt his notion of the future oppressive global government on Earth would be very different. With such forces at play, the free-market revolution in Lunar colonies would likewise be fought by different means, struggling to overcome the tidal wave of government indoctrination and demonization, in addition to an army of statist looters hiding behind the army of statist moochers, who will be hiding behind an army of statist Blue Helmets of the statist United Nations.

That would be an asymmetrical warfare if ever there was one. The individualist free-market rebels wouldn’t be able to respond in kind by playing the collectivist mind games with the statists because it would turn them into their own enemies. Their only hope would be to learn to recognize the game when it is being played, not to fall for any of its seductive illusions, methodically expose the players at every turn, call every little manipulative trick in their arsenal for what it is, and help to immunize the rest against its corruptive influence.
The tidal wave of propaganda notwithstanding, the rebels would still have the most important ally on their side — human nature. No matter into what society they are born and what mind conditioning they receive, people will never stop being competitive individuals. They will always long for individual freedom, rationality, objectivity, personal achievement, and the pursuit of a better life for themselves and their families.

Without these traits humanity would never have risen from the ignorant tribal collectivism of hunters and gatherers, with its brutal mores, dark superstitions, and average life expectancy of 30 years, when few lived long enough to develop complete self-awareness, formulate a coherent individual thought, and pass it onto others. There would be no division of labor, no markets, and no capitalist wealth to sustain the advances in science, arts, and technology — let alone to feed the multitudes of Marxist intellectuals and statist plutocrats. There would be nothing to lose and nothing to fight for.

Admittedly, the Marxist notion of human progress is a spiral that would return humanity to that stateless, moneyless, classless, and selfless collectivism — except on a higher level. For that purpose they must, so to speak, put the genie of individualism back into the bottle, and the only way they can do it is by demonizing human nature itself.

However, the 74 years of the morbid Soviet experiment failed to breed the New Collectivist Man. The communist “engineers of human souls” isolated millions of people from the rest of humanity by sealing off the nation’s borders and creating a pressurized Marxist bubble. They rearranged the society, rewrote history, and reorganized the culture. They subjected several generations of children to intense mind programming. They blocked all undesirable news sources, books, films, and music. They rewarded “correct” thoughts and impulses, and punished the “incorrect” ones. They demonized greed, selfishness, individualism, and self-interest. They taught altruism, collectivism, and self-sacrifice. They ran relentless campaigns that dehumanized non-compliant individuals.

Ultimately, not a single trait of human nature had changed. In the months before the collapse, the indisputable failure of collective farming forced the Soviet communists to resurrect the idea of individual farms — and, in order to survive, Chinese communists reverted to private entrepreneurship, while maintaining the pretense of Marxist orthodoxy.
This alone should be enough to discredit the fundamental Marxist doctrine that the human mind is a “social construct” shaped entirely by manipulation and social conditioning. As an unintended consequence, the Soviet experiment proved the existence of something that Marxist science has always denied: that our individual thoughts, motives, and actions are governed, on the most part, by absolute moral standards, which are objectively derived from the unchangeable nature of human beings and the nature of the world.

Obviously, it is more beneficial to accept human nature in its entirety as an absolute standard and to build the society on that foundation, rather than to erect an artificial construct first and rearrange the foundation later, trying to discard parts that don’t fit into the design.

And yet that failed philosophy is now flourishing in America’s academia and leftist think tanks, which currently formulate U.S. government policies.
From the economy to crime prevention to education to foreign relations, America’s policies today are based on the Marxist premise that crime results from poverty, economic crisis results from greed, injustice results from capitalist exploitation, corruption results from the free markets, and militant Islamism results from Western colonialism. Therefore, peace and harmony can only be achieved through equal redistribution of wealth, appeasement, and a global effort to reshape human nature through politically correct, collectivist indoctrination.

Predictably, a faulty premise leads to a faulty outcome: the economy is stumbling, education is failing, corruption is spreading, crime is rising, and militant Islamism is gaining more ground. Instead of creating the New Man, the suppression and demonization of natural human traits breeds moral and intellectual freaks. Where normalcy is outlawed, abnormalities flourish.

The most damaging outcome of this fallacy, however, is also the least visible — and thus rarely mentioned: the government effort to demonize our individual thoughts, impulses, and human nature itself can only result in the eventual dehumanization of our society, turning independent American citizens into mindless statistical units, spiritless cogs in the machine, and powerless subjects of the state, ripe for abuse by any sociopathic government official with dictatorial tendencies.

The Game can only exist in symbiosis with big government. They equally need each other for survival, nourishment, and expansion. Downsizing the government would not only deprive the Game of its nourishment, but would remove the very reason for its existence. Of course, the Game’s state sponsor can also be a foreign government — as it was with the network of KGB influence agents — but that is a matter for another discussion.
A free-market revolution’s primary function, therefore, would be to discard any policies or government structures that are based on the collectivist philosophy of demonization and dehumanization of the individual, starting with the Department of Education.

Human nature has taken us this far; there is every reason to believe it will continue to help us in the future.
* * *
In the meantime, a domestic influence operation known as OFA (Obama for America), is reorganizing, renaming itself Organizing for Action, [https://my.barackobama.com/page/s/organizing-for-action] and assuming a tax-exempt legal structure. It would be a mistake to think that since Obama is no longer running for office, his campaign outfit has outlived its purpose. Without its thundering acoustics, Obama would be as helpless as a lip-synching artist whose soundtrack went silent in the middle of an act.
The introduction and perpetuation of a collectivist, statist frame of reference among American voters was not only a prerequisite for Obama’s victory; it remains a vital ingredient of his governing style as the nation’s most powerful community organizer.

As such, even though OFA is not directly bankrolled by the U.S. Treasury, it has become an indispensable part of today’s big-government operation — the American version of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda, if you will — and, as every bureaucracy, it has no intention of downsizing. Having taken the Game to an unprecedented level and reaching its peak performance during the “fiscal cliff’s” hate week — rivaling in effectiveness the erstwhile Propaganda Department of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee — OFA is planning to solidify its structure and influence with a so-called Obama Campaign Legacy Conference.http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/01/obama-campaign-to-hold-legacy-conference-153863.html

Regrettably, the legacy of Obama campaign is not that of achievements in bettering the country, but rather that of perfecting shameless crowd manipulation aimed at grabbing more power and transforming America into something it was never meant to be.

In an email to supporters, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina writes, “Issues like immigration, climate change, and gun violence will be debated over these next four years, and President Obama is ready to take them on — but he needs us by his side. Our goal is to help him get things done, but also to help change how things get done in Washington in the first place.”

Thus, in addition to being a tradition in presidential elections, emotional manipulation is now also being geared to become an official replacement for a traditional legislative process. Marx would have described this as a great qualitative leap forward.

Messina further describes OFA as “an advantage that no previous president has enjoyed and one that has the potential to reshape our politics for years to come.”

Judging by past performance, the vague “reshaping of our politics” here translates into a very concrete subjugation of the legislative and judicial branches to the executive dictate and the elimination of the constitutional principle of checks and balances.
If this plan works, Obama and his Czars will be simply telling Congress and the courts what to do, as his Department of Agitation and Propaganda will discredit and demonize all non-compliant legislators and judges with coordinated “hate weeks” in the media and staged street protests, all the while feeding illusions of a major historic battle between good and evil to the misinformed public, who will eagerly play the part of a crowd with pitchforks and torches, especially if motivated with promises of more government handouts.

Any surviving opposition will thus be pressured and intimidated into submission, one by one, until the last resisting judge, congressman, or any other troublemaker is either removed from office or gives up the fight and succumbs to the Orwellian alternative reality, letting Obama fundamentally transform America as advertised. Thereafter, we may as well live in a Lunar colony — so small will be our chance to uproot the new ruling Party who will be setting the terms, framing the debate, writing the narrative, and otherwise stage-managing the bamboozled, easily manipulated subjects of the new “people’s republic.”

We may well be witnessing a pivotal moment in creating a system, against which a future free-market revolution will be fought. Let’s hope it won’t be merely a plot device in a libertarian sci-fi novel, because if this revolution doesn’t happen in real life, manuscripts of such nature may soon become inadmissible for publication.

Oleg Atbashian, a writer and graphic artist from the former USSR, is the author of Shakedown Socialism, of which David Horowitz said, “I hope everyone reads this book.” In 1994 he moved to the U.S. with the hope of living in a country ruled by reason and common sense, appreciative of its freedoms and prosperity. To his dismay, he discovered a nation deeply infected by the leftist disease of “progressivism” that was arresting true societal progress. American movies, TV, and news media reminded him of his former occupation as a visual propaganda artist for the Communist Party — a job he reluctantly held, as he knew that no intelligent person would take such art-by-numbers agitprop seriously. Oleg is the creator of a satirical website ThePeoplesCube.com, which Rush Limbaugh described on his show as “a Stalinist version of The Onion.” His graphic work frequently appears in the American Thinker.

Even before the failed twentieth century socialist regimes created misery and many collapsed under their inefficiencies, socialism failed a few times in France in the nineteenth century. The French Revolution that was based on resentment and inequality resulted in the dictatorship of Napoleon, and the couple that followed never took root.
Socialist ideas sprang from the Enlightenment “Age of Reason,” but to the author’s point, the early Enlightenment philosophers such as Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza and Leibniz used logic, science and mathematics to prove the existence of God and truth. They were using the fruits of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton’s discoveries about nature and science as a means to worship the Supreme Being and Creator of the Universe. They were not looking for a Utopia created by man.
This Utopian Dream began it seems with the nonsense of Rousseau who struggled with the inconsistencies of his “General Will” obfuscating about “particular will,” self-interest and lack of reason of the common man to know what the General Will is. I am about to read Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, but knowing enough about Marxism, it was not until perhaps 200 years ago that these Socialist ideas were formulated. As Mises points out in “Socialism,” it is not simply that they have not worked, but they cannot work. It is a material view of the world and called “dialectical materialism.” But man has always sought more than food and a shelter. They sought God and truth. Socialism offers neither.

Standing+Wolf
…man has always sought more than food and a shelter. They sought God and truth. Socialism offers neither.

Well said, VonMisesJr!
It’s occurred to me leftist extremists, having persuaded themselves they’ve disproved God, suddenly demand to be treated as gods.
All they’ve actually demonstrated is the enduring existence of evil.

Liberty_Clinger

“We’ll cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman… In the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth as one takes eggs from a hen… There will be no loyalty except loyalty toward the Party. There will be no love except the love of Big Brother… There will be no heart, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science.” George Orwell – 1984

Jacobite2

Why doesn’t Leftism offer truth and god? If, as they used to claim, Marxism was all about economic equality, what does religion have to do with it? Truth: Leftism is all about destroying normal human society, especially the foundation of every society — religion. Why destroy society? Every Leftist is either a “despised other” (Jews being a prime example) ineligible for membership in society (except Israel, of course). or a natural member who cannot adapt to his society’s rules and customs (criminals, atheists, lunatics, sexual perverts). Moderates and Conservatives cannot respond to leftism, because they refuse to make religion, race, and langauge the priorities in their movements. Only Rightists will confront leftists directly.

physicsnut

I do not think that utopianism is anything more than a deliberate mask. The fact that ‘it does not work’ depends on whose side you are on. If your goal is to loot and rape and murder, it works great. But that is EXACTLY what their goal was – be they Jacobins or Bolsheviks. Of course they would not come out and SAY that the goal is to loot, rape and murder – that would be telling. So they need a deception strategy – to fool an entire population. Why would you expect Ghengiz Khan to produce better outcomes for people ? Mises misses the whole point by addressing what they SAY rather than what they DO.

Dlanor, American

There are a lot of ideas about Departed Deity, General Will, Collective Unconscious, Reconciling Will, Pre-Determined Will, Fate, Participatory Will, etc. One way to think about the apparent unfoldment is to conceptualize that which is Determined (caused?) as showing three faces of the same thing, i.e., that which is (1) Pre-Determined, (2) Randomly Determined, and (3) Contemporaneously Determined. Is time mere stubborn illusion, must at least a chronological record of the past exist, is that record reliable, or is there only re-normalizing feedback with the Perpetual Now? A model may be made out of each conceptualization. When made into a scientific fetish, however, each model seems to feed back to absurdity. Even so, there are questions that need to be addressed, even though they cannot be empirically answered. These are the most important questions, the ones for which empiricism is blind, but for which thoughtful life finds unavoidable. The “answers” to such questions seem to abide in how one lives and relates to one’s existence. It seems one comes either to conceptualize and respect principles of individual freedom and dignity, or one does not. It is important to suss out which camp one is among. Does one find it self evident that Will is purposeful, beyond mere pleasuring of glands? If so, one is likely a Conservative (classical Liberal). If not, one may be a Prog (gland stuff of the Borg-mos).

dwk67

While the left’s quixotic tendencies allow them the luxury of believing a collectivist society will tame human nature, in actuality the reverse is true. A society of individuals variously competing and cooperating can mute to some extent the negative aspects of human nature. However, a collectivist society will only amplify the worst aspects of human nature which is why a Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao can do so much damage. Democratic politics rewards mild to moderate ruthlessness in general and tends to repel many of those who are well adjusted human beings from seeking office. A Marxist/Collectivist society rewards ONLY he who is most ruthless, as such, tends to attract only those who are most brutal and emotionally scarred to seek the ultimate power over the people with the predictable monstrous results…

philliesthoughts

It is an unfortunate outcome though of trying to control that much ruthlessness, greed, viciousness, and anger. It is much akin to trying to ride the tiger. You just might wind up inside rather than in power! The Roman emperors tried to use the mob of the populace back in their day in order to maintain their rule but instead became ruled themselves by their fear of the mob getting out of control. The emperors, like today’s progressive tyrannical wannabe’s played into the mob’s baser passions in order to keep them battle ready for when they needed them but all that did was make the mob more unmanageable and more amenable to those who had more money to please them. It would have done the mobs back then and people now a lot more good if those in power would have curried people’s better sides through exhortation and example but that didn’t work because when all was said and done the people in charge were actually no better or superior than those they ruled or stirred up. They just had a little bit more money is all. Same ruthlessness, same greed, same viciousness, and the same anger.

Mike6

Obama silly smiles during his last speech reminded me of Joe Stalin smiling lasciviously on the Lenin Mausoleum during the May Day parade. Stalin was gloating about murdering or starving to death all his enemies in Siberian Gulags. First, Stalin cleverly eliminated his left Bolsheviks opposition like Leon Trotsky and them his Right Wing Bolsheviks like Bukharin. Finally the NKVD arrested and destroyed the 5 million innocent, hard working, rich, God Fearing kulaks who went to Holy Mass every Sunday.
Like Stalin, Obama wants to eliminate his Republican opponents in the House and the Senate. Democrats are expanding their voter base with free-stuff gifts to the low information voters. Then Obamacare “death panes” will tell sick, tired, old, white men who are clinging on to their bibles and guns to shut up and make way for young people who voted for Obama.
Obama like FDR wants to become President for life.

physicsnut

Things are not what they seem. Collective farms have nothing to do with collectivism and everything to do with an excuse to take the kids away from the parents, and break the transmission of values. Bolsheviks created something called the New Church, which was a front to call for the Church to give up any gold it had to provide food for the starving millions – which famine was caused by the Bolsheviks. Collectivism was nothing but a convenient mask – a public face – behind which Bolsheviks did whatever they were going to do anyway – which had more to do with Ghengiz Khan and the Jacobins and war of extermination. If it was not collectivism, it would be some other plausible line of baloney to mask their real intentions, which are atavistic. Bolsheviks think it worked great – they got to loot what little middle class existed in Russia, and send the loot to Germany mostly, to further the Revolution there. There is a volume in the Yale series which has Minutes of the Politburo – they were not debating how to implement collectivism, but mostly stuff like that New Church campaign. It strikes me that all the blabber about collectivist stuff was a psychological operation to provide plausible cover. For example, when Stalin decided to woo Hitler, Karl Radek came up with “strategic eyewash” in the form of the Popular Front – to convince everybody that Stalin was Hitler’s enemy. Somebody ought to tally up the amount of money the Bolsheviks spent on these deception campaigns. It would be eye popping. As far as I can tell, just about Everything they did was “strategic eyewash” – including everything they push about collectivism.

Mike6

Joe Stalin collectivised the kulaks because they hated the Bolsheviks, worked hard, had gold, livestock, good farm land, and went to Holy Mass every Sunday. Some kulaks may have been former heroic White Russian Officers who knew how to shoot, and they had fought the Reds in the Civil War to the last bullet and to the last man. The Holodomor that Stalin and his NKVD created starved to death 5 million God Fearing Russian and Ukranian kulaks on the most fertile soil on earth.

Like Obama, Stalin preached class warfare, nasty vulture capitalists, equality, social justice, diversity, and about sharing the wealth. Joe Stalin robbed the Russian middle class. He did this not to help the proletariat but to spread his revolution, build nice dachas for top Bolshevik Party goons, and to manufacture the massive 65 ton Marshall Vorosholov battle tank to conquer the world.

Contemplatix

Perhaps you would want to add to your literature a book that incidently was published in Orwell’s year of 1984: Anatoliy Golitsyn’s “New Lies for Old: The Communist Strategy of Deception and Disinformation”; Dodd, Mead & Co., New York 1984. – Although a bit of a dry read, nevertheless, it is THE reference work on communist long-range strategy (beside his second book, “The Perestroika Deception”), that even – believe it or not – predicted the whole fake ‘liberalisation’, fake ‘democratisation’, and even fake ‘bloc dissolution’ in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, that so fatally the West to this day has taken at face value. – Without knowing or understanding that what happened there during the last 25 years was the biggest deception operation in human history, looking at what now is being done to the United States lacks the necessary frame of reference, that – once recognised – makes the whole picture even more horrifying: a giant still-existing communist bloc, including first of all the basically unchanged USSR and the People’s Republic of China, now pressing for complete communist world domination.

AR1476

I believe that in the near future Americans will begin to rebel against the freedom sapping restraints the liberals want us to follow. Baron von Steuben, a former Prussian military officer and a Major General in the American Revolutionary Army noticed that, unlike Germans, Americans don’t take orders very well, unless the reason for the order is first explained to them.

milkdud

“… unlike Germans, Americans don’t take orders very well,…”

It has always bothered me, when we see pictures of the Holocaust, of the Jews just going off into that “good” night, without putting up a fight. I never could quite understand that. I have thought a lot about what your post is about, and from all that I’m hearing, “We The People” are a lot feistier than the Jews of the Holocaust, or so I think. I know it’s easy to talk big when we’re sitting here as we are now, but I’m hoping and praying that “We The People” will be feisty personified when the time comes. I have a question, though. Even if “We The People” meet our enemy with force, isn’t that just going to be a recipe for getting mowed down? I have said it before, but I’ll say it again…I’m not a concentration camp type of person, therefore, it it comes down to it, they can just finish me off right here on my own doorstep, because I’m not going to go off and waste away in a camp someplace. I’ve seen too many holocaust pictures that seared my soul, and I am not in the last interested going to one of those

I pray that “We The People” will indeed rise to the occasion when we’re called upon to do so. I am a southerner, and I have great faith in our boys in the south. They’re locked and loaded, and I believe if anybody stands up to the enemy, they will. In all fairness, after reading AT for awhile, I also believe that there are MANY patriots in all section of this once great land of ours, who’ll join their southern brothers, in doing whatever it is that they are called upon to do, in the interest of saving our way of life.
Thank you for your post. I appreciated it. God Bless The United States Of America, and God Bless Us All.
ed
I.m locked and loaded too, and I’m not too far from Boston. And there are many others here who will also. Count on it. With regard to the camps, I had many jewish neighbors as a kid in nyc who all had numbers tattooed on the inside of their left forearms. It was real. It really happened; I know, because I had the distinct privelege of knowing some of them personally. I assure you I will not go either.
philliesthoughts

Absolutely the Holocaust happened. There were too many WWII vets who walked into those camps for it not to have been real. There was even a court case back in the 90’s I think where some White Supremacist was going around trying to prove that the Holocaust didn’t happen. He was sued and lost in court because there were too many veterans who had walked through those camps, saw the horror that was there and had to help the inmates that were left alive. There was a made for tv movie about it starring Leonard Nimoy. I too knew people with the tatoo. Too think that it was all a hoax is just the left side of insanity. Oh, that’s right it IS!!!

But I pray God to save us when the last of our WWII vets go to meet their Maker because there will be no more actual eye-witnesses left to that horrific tragedy and, just like with our Founders and our American history, the left will take it and turn what happened into something else entirely!!

Oh, that movie was called “Never Forget” about Mel Mermelstein who was asked to prove that people were actually gassed at Auschwitz. Mr. Mermelstein was a Holocaust survivor.

Izzy3
I have relatives that lived in a town in Germany where 30% of the population was jewish. They didn’t tell the townspeople what they were doing. People got along in that town, and there were a lot of mixed marriages. They told everyone (jew and non-jew) the jews were going to work camp. They didn’t know what was about to happen. The non-jewish people expected them to come back at the end of the war. Half the men (in the military) and most of the 30% of the jewish population never returned. I’m sure they wouldn’t have gone willingly if they knew what evil awaited them. Everyone was lied to. They all trusted the government.

Standing+Wolf
They all trusted the government.
I’m sure that was a large part of it, Izzy3, and here was another: the vast majority of European Jews couldn’t so much as imagine the idea a nation could commit mass murder.

The first lesson history tries to teach is very few people learn the lessons of history.

Eldon Roehl

Read the short book, “How do you kill 11 million people”. Basically, they lied to everyone, and by the time you realized what was happening, if you even did, it was too late.

Ranger+Joe

That was always my contention. How could anyone in their wildest dreams foresee the Holocaust? We have the luxury of hindsight. Stalin’s Holomodor and Hitler’s Final solution were all done in secret under the radar away from prying eyes. American GI’s who came upon the concentration camps were so outraged they went Hun Hunting in nearby towns. Patton had to stop them. Only Hitler’s tight inner circle knew what was up. There’s a story of an SS field officer who had no idea and witnessed a mass execution on a beach one day when one of his subordinates ran to him and said he had to see what was going on. He became ashamed for his nation and worked against Hitler from that day on.

ed
I got my first sales job with a German engineering firm in North jersey in 1983. I had no experience, and they were all quite helpful. I became friends with the production manager, Fritz, who came here after the war and became a citizen. he was quite a character. We hit it off almost immediately; I remember him telling me of his Parish priest, when he was an altar boy, telling him he was going to hell, and depicting Fritz as being on the cross. You had to be there, but it was hysterical, knowing Fritz. To this day I hope he is safe and happy. He is, and was, a very decent man.
He was as I reacll 9 or 10 years old when Berlin fell. it was utter chaos as you might expect. As a kid, you have a kids perspective on the world, though that doesn’t mean you have no clue as to what is going on around you. he told me the citizenry had no idea what was happening to the Jews. I believe him, as a child. I can’t believe him, as a man. I know he knew; many of them did know. it’s why they feel guilt to this day. All the anti-jewish propaganda of the day HAD to have some effect on him. I understand why he had to believe what he believed. he really had no choice in the matter. Frankly, many of them didn’t. And I see something eerily similar to that happening today. The same coerced ignorance; the same silence re silencing of the opposition. It’s the age old plague: be quiet, or be gone. Thanks anyway. I’ll go hoarse before i’m gone.

Repubby_Hubby

I think everyone is a little too pessimistic. Our country has actually always been pretty centrist. We don’t tend to go to the far left communism or far right fascism. We tend to stay pretty much in the middle as do most countries.

My wife had a political science minor in college and she says that while we have both elements of left wing socialism in programs like Social Security and Medicare, we also have elements of right wing fascism in our corporatism. But she says we’re not far enough down either side of those spectrums to call our country Fascist or Communist. There are really no pure fascist or communist countries out there today. China is the closest to being communist but even they’ve given up much of their collectivism, and the closest thing to fascist countries are these little militaristic countries that are pure capitalist but very repressive.

She says words like true Left Wing Communism and true Right Wing Fascism don’t apply well to any countries today. So I wouldn’t worry about it.

VonMisesJr

The late nineteenth century Prussian Empire was militaristic and when it was defeated, the Weimar Republic sprang up in Germany (1919-1933). The Weimar Republic had three socialist Parties (Majority Socialist, Independent Socialist and Communist) with virtually no faction promoting free markets and free trade. The Weimar had rebellion, revolution, depression and finally hyperinflation. Hitler promised jobs and food and the people were not unaccustomed to their nation using force to attain wealth.
Hitler confiscated guns in 1937, so by the time he started taking the Jews out in the night, the German people had been through socialist hell and back and were easily propagandized, and the Jews could not effectively prevent being taken nor was the destination sure since once you were gassed, you could not tell the Jewish family down the street.
The American people have not been through a rebellion and revolution since 1776, a depression since the 1940’s and we had the Reagan years that many of us remember well. I do not see a repeat of Nazi Germany, although a depression is not off the table. If the regime wants our guns, they may get rebellion and revolution, although it will be to remove a dictator, not to install one.

VonMisesJr

Reply to my friend milkdud:
Thank you for your kind words. It is not that I do not see another Holocaust. I think that we are failing miserably at even discussing that it could happen any day. Just not in America. Hitler systematically exterminated 6M Jews and about 7M Catholics, Poles and others. Obama has refused to deter Iran from securing a nuclear weapon. His regime has supported government overthrow in Egypt and Libya and is arming Syrian Al Qaeda. Either a nuclear attack or a coordinated attack by the neighbors contiguous to Israel could prove to be a Holocaust on steroids.
But my point is that I do not see a successful Nazi-like movement in the United States since unlike the Weimar Republic, we have factions of fiscal and social conservatives, libertarians and even some moderate Democrats that are not all in with the current day liberal/progressive socialist. The Nazis and the Bolsheviks before them reached the plateau of totalitarianism due in part to their lack of understanding and love of liberty and property rights.
A depression is much more likely than most are willing to admit. If you look at the real U6 at 15%, baby boomers retiring and current work force participation down from mid-65% to mid-63% with SSDI and food stamps on the rise, and real inflation (including food and fuel) at 6-8% per Peter Schiff; we have a Misery Index of about Carter levels that reached 23%.
With zero interest rates from the Fed forever, the Bond Market and consumer lending are stalled and the stock market while anemic in volume is absorbing the inflation of the M2 money supply that was expanded from $3T to $9T in five years and with QE3 and QE4 of $85B per month, it is expanding at $1T per year in perpetuity.
Herb Stein once quipped that “if something is unsustainable, it will stop.” This is the unfortunate situation for Israel’s security and the U.S. economy.

philliesthoughts

Most of that was because by the time the Revolutionary War came along we had had several generations of Americans who did not grow up under the quasi-serfdom of the Old World. They were truly free beings. Also, most of the people who had come to America came here because they wanted to be free not because they were pushed out of the old country which is what happened with later immigrations (Irish potato famine, pogroms, etc.) Most Europeans took orders so well because they were used to doing so from the time they were born until the time they died. Regimentation was natural to them. Also, even though there was no active serfdom as such in most of Europe there was still a very embedded class system and most people had even been trained that the station that they were born into was God ordained. Not realizing that that too was a human construct (worked well for those who wanted to remain in power) and neither God nor the Bible says any such thing. That is one reason why socialism worked so well in Europe first. Most of the populations were not yet free from the reign of an overlord long enough for them to actually have a taste of freedom and to know that they were as equal as any other person regardless of where they were born or how much money/property that they were born with.

Ranger+Joe

I am very familiar with the good Baron…having worked at a historic site connected with him. Washington knew the patriot militias were fierce fighters…but there were times when their wildness superceded good order and discipline. He spent a lot of time breaking up fights and being a mother hen to the homesick farmboys ready to sprout wings. If he could shape them into a proper military force it would boost sagging morale. Von Steuben sailed to America unsolicited and sought him out. He graciously offered his services. Left-right, left-right…order arms and all that. He wrote a manual of drill for the troops. He shaped them up rather nicely.

There was a lot of support for our cause from European aristocrats. The Marquis de Lafayette and Count Casimir Pulaski (an accomplished cavalryman) also joined the cause. They were well educated in the philosophical ideals of the Grand Enlightenment sweeping Europe and saw America as the birthplace of the freedom long sought by humanity. They felt compelled to participate in the creation of the greatest utopia on planet earth.

We now have The Count de Marquis Baron Oleg von Atbashian from the Ukraine here to educate us. Another of Steuben’s major contributions was proper camp sanitation by the digging of trench latrines away from the campsites…no small thing. Fever and dysentery were killing people.

Liberty_Clinger

OA: “The most damaging outcome of this [Marxist/Collectivist] fallacy, however, is also the least visible — and thus rarely mentioned: the government effort to demonize our individual thoughts, impulses, and human nature itself can only result in the eventual dehumanization of our society, turning independent American citizens into mindless statistical units, spiritless cogs in the machine…”

“The individual is only a cell… power is collective. The individual only has power in so far that he ceases to be an individual… If he can make complete utter submission; if he can escape from his identity; if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all powerful and immortal… Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death; the Party is immortal… You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do, and will turn against us; but we create human nature.” George Orwell – 1984
“We have arrived at this view of socialism in attempting to account for the contradictions evident in the phenomenon at first glance. And now, looking back, we feel confident that our approach indeed accounts for many of socialism’s peculiarities. Understanding socialism as one of the manifestations of the allure of death explains its hostility toward individuality, its desire to destroy those forces which support and strengthen human personality: religion, culture, family, individual property. It is consistent with the tendency to reduce man to the level of a cog in the state mechanism, as well as with the attempt to prove that man exists only as a manifestation of non-individual features, such as production or class interest.” Igor Shafarevich – “The Socialist Phenomenon”

philliesthoughts

“Socialism seeks to reduce human personality to its most primitive levels and to extinguish the highest, most complex, and “God-like” aspect of human individuality.” In terms of physics it seems socialism is akin to turning off the sun. The sun is dynamic, atomic, seething, mostly beneficial and sometimes destructive but all life on earth is connected to it. Just like human beings. To reduce us to our basest capacity is to make us inert. Without individuality there is no music, no art, no great books, no love, no hate, no great civilization, no architecture, nothing. It is our direct dynamics with each other that provides much that is interesting in life. But that IS life. Nothing in life is static and since we are natural to this world then we shouldn’t be static either. So this basically makes socialism un-natural and therefore dangerous.

philliesthoughts

I don’t believe necessarily that they are. Both put man as the acme of evolution. The smartest animal on the planet as they believe. Darwinian evolution says that man is moving towards something in his evolution and what is he moving towards if not a bigger, better, smarter, etc., etc., version of himself by eliminating those of his species that are weaker (survival of the fittest). Some evolutionists have proposed that man will someday evolve so high that he will make the ultimate paradigm shift and become pure intellect which only proves that the Bible is true in it’s assessment of man. Genesis 3:5 writ large: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall BE AS GODS, knowing good and evil.” Of course, this dialogue showed the offer was made by Lucifer who didn’t ever have the ability to deliver on that offer. God never promised any such thing of the kind to men in the first place simply because He knew that man could never BE HIM. We were images not duplicates. We were made in the tri-partite IMAGE of God not as little gods ourselves. Marx grounded his philosophy in Darwinism in part because he believed that some were meant to rule while others were meant to be ruled even while couching it all in the seeming benign mantle of equality and collectivism.

This is so true, and so simple, yet so frustrating.

Referring again to my own sister the liberal, who is if nothing else an object lesson for me, I offer this case in point:

My sister is university educated. She dropped out after a few years to “join the revolution” in the late 60s and after trying nearly every social experiment the 60s counterculture had to offer, ended up on a farm in a rural blue state. She has been a lifelong committed leftists, but the one thing we always had in common was our deep mistrust of big government.

But something has happened. She is now a full fledged statist. She posts adoring things about Dear Leader on facebook. She ferrets out every criticism of him and responds to them. In her world, Dear Leader is blameless and without spot or blemish. Republicans and conservatives are ”selfish obstructionists” because even though Repubs are rolling over for DL like a submissive Chihuahua, it is not happening fast enough for the left. Any opposition to DLs ideas or plans is “obstruction.” Any hint of wrongdoing on his part is a ”right wing conspiracy.” Government must continue to grow, provide, control, and grow and provide and control some more.

She posted this thing the other day about the conservatives’ paranoid delusions and listed all the “conspiracies” in which Dear Leader is accused of or implicated in being at the center. She informed me that anyone who believes DL did not write his own books, or that Benghazi is a cover-up, or that Fast and Furious has anything to do with his administration are crazy tin foil hat vampire hunters. I asked her if she ever looked into any of these things. She said of course not, because they are preposterous. She asked if I would seriously ever look into the existence of unicorns or leprechauns. I pointed out that unlike her, even though I doubted a massive 9-11 conspiracy, I at least looked into it so I could know what I was talking about and make up my own mind. She has no such intellectual curiosity. If it comes from the right, it is automatically suspect, automatically a racist attack on DL, and automatically hateful, evil and completely wrong.

For we on the conservative side, reality and truth stand on their own merits. Gravity and the principle of lift are real, and 2+2=4 is truth whether spoken by Mother Teresa or Hitler. Yet for the statist left, truth and reality are entirely dependent on the source. Hence, if Fox News reported that the sun would rise tomorrow, the left would demand verification from an ”acceptable” source and dismiss whatever Fox said. If Karl Rove said that the top 1% pay nearly 40% of all federal income tax collected by the IRS, why, it is howled at with derision by the left. It matters not that it is true and easily verifiable; it was said by Rove, and therefore utterly noncredible.

This is the frustrating part. I totally get “methodically expose the players at every turn, call every little manipulative trick in their arsenal for what it is, and help to immunize the rest against its corruptive influence.” But how can we, when they invent their own reality, their own facts, and refuse to acknowledge reality? I know I’ve said this before, but it applies here: it is like playing basketball with people who make up their own rules as they go. They supply the referees from their own bench, and have their own teammates announcing the game on the radio. When forced to concede that even in the midst of a stacked game they are still losing, they stop the game, pick up their ball and leave, mocking and ridiculing their opponents on the way out.

It took nearly 70 years for us to lose the culture. It is going to take a few generations to get it back, if in fact we can. It will be difficult and maddening in the beginning. I’m not convinced we have put a dent in the leftward direction in which we are still sliding. In short, we haven’t hit bottom yet. It is a fight we must engage, and we must win, but it will take time, and I’m not sure we have that much of it. Conservatism and traditionalism may yet prevail. I just pray we don’t have to endure 74 years of hell like the USSR did before it does.

pipercomanche
Repubby_Hubby – I hate to break the bad news to you and your wife, but Fascism was not right wing, it was far left. The Nazi party was the National Socialists – that is left. So much for a political science minor from a liberal university. Learn some history instead of the propaganda the liberal universities dish out.

Ranger+Joe
You got it! Hitler once said that he was going to forge a perfect Marxist State in Germany. Little Joey Goebbels wrote a propaganda essay ‘Why We Are Socialists’.

milkdud
ricpic…
“And make no mistake, when a society has been demoralized it is not at all certain that it can be resuscitated — ever.”
You just said a mouthful, and what you said in your post couldn’t be more correct. I have been noticing, more and more lately, that people, in general, have begun to feel demoralized. I have been using the word, “beleaugred” to describe what I’m noticing, but “demoralized” is a better fit. I feel it myself, even though I fight it, because, as you said, “once we get completely demoralized, there is a better than average chance, that we cannot be resucitated,” and as you said…”ever.” It’s an utterly sobering concept as far as I’m concerned. I feel that our enemies have already made HUGE and dangerous inroads into our society in this regard.
Your post is excellent, and your message is something that “We The People” need to know and understand. I also think that posts like yours are tools in helping us to combat this evil that has come upon us. I am going to make it a point to NOT feel demoralized, OR, belegured

SFLBIB

Re: “And yet that failed philosophy is now flourishing in America’s academia and leftist think tanks, which currently formulate U.S. government policies.”
That’s not the only thing that has come out of academia. Affirmative action, diversity, radical egalitarianism, and same-sex “marriage” all came from academia. Victor Klemperer has an answer: ” … If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had honorable intentions and not known what they were doing. But I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lampposts for as long as was compatible with hygiene.” — “I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941”. Klemper was a professor of Literature at the University of Dresden, a Jew, and victim of Nazi persecution.

greenroughneck

Man, this just gets worse by the day. And I live in Wy! I cannot imagine being any where near a city right now. I just wonder how long it’ll take for the next “shot heard around the world” ? This is America, and while I’m not so naive as to believe it can’t happen hear, we are not pre-soviet russia either. Or England. Or Australia. We DO have a Constitution that DOES include the bill of rights. We will not go gently. 240 years of freedom in our veins is a deep ember, not easily extinguished. Secession is coming friends.

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About arnash

“When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” - Mark Twain - Politicians and diapers - change 'em often, for the same reason.
"Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other." Ronald Reagan
"Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views."
William F. Buckley, Jr.
“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” - Bertrand Russell
The people are the masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert it. Abraham Lincoln “Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their
behalf.” - George Orwell
“Satan will use a lake of truth to hide a pint of poison”.